University timetabling through conceptual modeling

✍ Scribed by Jonathan Lee; Shang-Pin Ma; Lien Fu Lai; Nien Lin Hsueh; Yong-Yi Fanjiang

• Book ID: 102279948
• Publisher: John Wiley and Sons
• Year: 2005
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 351 KB
• Volume: 20
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0884-8173
• DOI: 10.1002/int.20115

✦ Synopsis

A number of approaches have been proposed in tackling the timetabling problem, such as operational research, human-machine interaction, constraint programming, expert systems, and neural networks. However, there are still several key challenges to be addressed: easily reformulated to support changes, a generalized framework to handle various timetabling problems, and ability to incorporate knowledge in the timetabling system. In this article, we propose an automatic software engineering approach, called task-based conceptual graphs, to addressing the challenges in the timetabling problem. Task-based conceptual graphs provide the automation of software development processes including specification, verification, and automatic programming. Maintenance can be directly performed on the specifications rather than on the source code; moreover, hard and soft constraints can be easily inserted or removed. A university timetabling system in the Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering at National Central University is used as an illustrative example for the proposed approach.